Policing the State

The telegraph’s potential utility in ensuring state security had been repeatedly evoked during the 1840s, and the technology quickly became an essential tool for police forces across Europe. Reforms of the police service had been ongoing since the early nineteenth century, but they received renewed impetus following the insurgencies of 1848, and new means of communication strengthened the powers and efficiency of these ostensibly civilian forces which increasingly took over from the army as guardians of the social order.⁴³ This was, in many ways, a pan-European development, as the international character of the 1848 insurgencies and the generation of political exiles which they had dispersed across the contin-ent highlighted the need for cooperation across state borders.⁴⁴ The quasi-instantaneity of telegraphy had obvious advantages for institutions such as the semi-official ‘Polizei-Verein’ (Police Association) of German states established during the 1850s, and the networks of secret agents employed by the Prussian and Austrian authorities went some way to monitoring increasingly mobile subversives, although truly international policing associations would only emerge at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴⁵

In the immediate aftermath of the mid-century upheavals, the telegraph offered a means of surveilling regions still simmering with unrest. In Aachen, the Regierungspräsidentrequested permission to communicate with police authorities across the border in Verviers, a connection which he considered important due to the‘social and industrial relations’of local‘factory cities’, and because the Belgian town in question was rather close to the German border and‘entirely suited to all manner of gatherings and machinations of the politically dissatisfied’.⁴⁶In Breslau, a senior official asked the government whether he might use the railway telegraph line in case of trouble, as there was no state-owned connection available.⁴⁷ In

⁴² J. Reindl,Der Deutsch-Österreichische Telegraphenverein und die Entwicklung des deutschen Telegraphenwesens, 1850–1871(Frankfurt am Main, 1993), pp. 163–6.

⁴³ C. Emsley,Policing and its Context, 1750–1870(London, 1983); R. Evans,Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800–1996(London, 1997), pp. 65–86; H.-H. Liang,The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 18–82.

⁴⁴ H. Pogge von Strandmann,‘1848–1849: A European Revolution?’, inThe Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849, ed. R.J.W. Evans and H. Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1–8.

⁴⁵ W. Siemann,Deutschlands Ruhe, Sicherheit und Ordnung: Die Anfänge der politischen Polizei, 1806–1866(Tübingen, 1985), pp. 242–459; M. Deflem,Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation(Oxford, 2002), pp. 45–77.

⁴⁶ GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 813, Bd. 2, Regierungspräsident Aachen to Westphalen, 11 Dec. 1851.

⁴⁷ GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 813, Regierungspräsident Breslau to Westphalen, 10 Apr. 1851.

Bavaria, the town of Ansbach was provided with a telegraph office specifically to enable the local government to monitor the political situation in nearby Nuremberg.⁴⁸

In these places, the new technology gave the authorities a temporal advantage, allowing them to coordinate responses to an incident before it got out of hand. In particular, it enabled police forces to keep up with suspects’ movements, an increasingly challenging task in the age of railway transportation. As the mayor of Augsburg stated, ‘The use of the railway is no longer sufficient, because the criminal can make use of it too, and has already obtained a head start. The most reliable means of rapid pursuit is the electromagnetic telegraph.’⁴⁹

Among the most avid users of the technology for the purposes of state security was Berlin’s police president, Carl von Hinckeldey, who oversaw the restructuring of the Prussian police force and, enjoying the confidence of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was granted a considerable degree of autonomy. Hinckeldey was eager to use the telegraph in helping his officers to coordinate their activities, and he consistently fought for police telegrams to be considered ‘Staatsdepeschen’ (state telegrams) and therefore free of charge. His zeal in doing so, however, led to repeated conflicts with the Prussian telegraph administration, and indeed Minister of Trade von der Heydt himself, who complained of the excessive burden placed upon the network by the police forces and insisted that they pay the full fee for the service.⁵⁰

One of Hinckeldey’sflagship initiatives was the development of afire preven-tion telegraph network across Berlin which could also be employed for police purposes. The original idea was to connect the variousfirefighting services across the city, so that incidents might be reported and responded to more efficiently. In his 1851 report on the topic, however, Hinckeldey suggested extending this planned network to connect various buildings of the war ministry, the ministry of the interior, and each of the thirty-six police stations spread out across the city.⁵¹ It was then suggested that the foreign ministry and the royal palace in Berlin should be similarly connected to the network.⁵² In proto-Haussmannian style, the state was thus arming itself with a new means of managing the circulation of people and information across urban space.⁵³

⁴⁸ StAN, Rep. 270/IV, Nr. 4, Draft of letter from Regierung Ansbach to HM, 14 Nov. 1850.

⁴⁹ Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, C 7/I, Nr. 2762, Erster Bürgermeister Augsburg to Magistrat Nürnberg, 30 Oct. 1850.

⁵⁰ A. Ross,Beyond the Barricades: Government and State-Building in Post-Revolutionary Prussia, 1848–58(Oxford, 2019).

⁵¹ GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 1316, Nr. 1, Hinckeldey to Westphalen, 7 June 1851.

⁵² GStA PK I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 1316, Nr. 1, Berlin Magistrat to Westphalen, 6 Sept. 1851.

⁵³ Cf. Q. Deluermoz,Policiers dans la ville: La construction de l’ordre publique à Paris, 1854–1914 (Paris, 2012).

Outside Berlin, meanwhile, the telegraph was being used to track down suspects moving across Germany and beyond. Cases varied from criminals seeking toflee the country via the port city of Bremen to a missing 16-year-old boy whose father believed he had run away to work on a ship.⁵⁴The pursuit of these individuals required collaboration between the various state police and telegraph administra-tions, emphasizing the need for a collective regulation of practices. The ‘Polizei-Verein’established by Hinckeldey and his collaborators in Austria, Bavaria, and Saxony for the purpose of monitoring political suspects, in particular, required that the telegraph be used to notify the relevant authorities in case of necessity.⁵⁵ The emerging surveillance network possessed a number of blind spots, how-ever. In 1851, for instance, a Hungarian revolutionary was spotted near Bayreuth, and although warnings were sent from Munich to neighbouring Bamberg, the authorities in Bayreuth, being deprived of a telegraph office, were left unaware of this communication. When the suspect fled to Bohemia, the president of the regional government wrote to the minister of trade explaining that ‘24 hours earlier, warrants could have been sent out to capture [him] if it were possible to telegraph from Munich to here as well as Bamberg,—a loss of time which in such a case, and given the ease with which one can use the railways to escape police deployments, cannot be compensated for’.⁵⁶As the president’s complaint high-lighted, the piecemeal introduction of the technology had begun to establish distinctions between those areas with access to the service and those without. In the process, it was interfering with administrative protocol by creating a temporal hierarchy. In this case, theStadt-Kommissarin Bamberg had received information by telegraph ahead of the president himself, who now demanded that all such telegrams be forwarded to him with the next post.⁵⁷

Outside the police forces, and despite the considerable enthusiasm which civil servants had expressed for the adoption of the technology, its use was not immediately widespread in the day-to-day workings of the bureaucracy. To be sure, the technology was of immediate utility in diplomatic circles, who had long depended upon extensive networks of communication, but its incorporation into practices of administration was rather slow.⁵⁸Throughout Bavaria, for instance, only 459 state telegrams were sent during thefirst six months of 1851. When the regional government in Ansbach asked its subordinate departments to report on their potential use of the technology, the NurembergMagistratreplied that its use

⁵⁴ Stadtarchiv Wuppertal, Q II 61, Telegram Polizei-Commissair Elberfeld to Telegraphen-Station Bremen, 18 July 1873.

⁵⁵ W. Siemann (ed.),Der‘Polizeiverein’deutscher Staaten: Eine Dokumentation zur Überwachung der Öffentlichkeit nach der Revolution von 1848/9(Tübingen, 1983), p. 30.

⁵⁶ BHStA, MH 16799, Regierung Oberfranken to HM, 28 Apr. 1851. ⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ D. Headrick,The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (New York, 1991), pp. 73–5; D. P. Nickles,Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

had thus far been so rare as to make an informed estimate impossible.⁵⁹By the end of the decade, even in an important town such as Augsburg, an average of only one state telegram was either sent or received on a daily basis.⁶⁰

Access to the telegraph, it would seem, had often been requested on a precau-tionary basis, to strengthen the confidence of the authorities in their ability to manage unexpected situations. TheRegierungspräsidentin Breslau who had asked for access to the telegraph to monitor local unrest, for instance, admitted that he had not once made use of the service. The office which had been opened in Ansbach for similar reasons later reported that its use had been uneconomically low. In fact, the telegraphist there expressed the desire ‘to be kept busy with telegrams more often’, and the local authorities were therefore encouraged to make more frequent use of the service.⁶¹